Originally a BBS run out of a garage and under the stairs of a house up against the base of the hills in San Rafael, CA.
After fighting with Pacific Bell (pre-Satanic Bullshit Corp aquisition) over residential rates for what was, in truth, a business, and realizing that any BBS is inherently limited to the number of lines and modems available, this Internet thing showed up. One line no longer equated to one user.
Some time after, the service migrated to MAE West's facility, what for to have a better newsfeed, and was recristened "Supernews", specializing in a (crappy) Usenet-to-Web gateway.
Ages passed. A&M transpired, Supernews begat Remarq, Remarq subsumed by [link|http://quote.yahoo.com/q?s=CPTH&d=c&k=c1&a=v&p=s&t=2y&l=on&z=m&q=l|Critical Path]. From a market high of nearly $120, CPTH now trades at $0.58, and two executives have left the company under an SEC probe. Interesting to note: 13% of all NASDAQ stocks are now trading below $1.
My piece in all of this? That BBS belonged to the kid brother of a friend of mine. Craig Wallace was the sysop of that board, and continued with the company through its various twists and turns. My memories are of some poignant ASCII art dot-matrix printouts that somehow got taped up behind the sliding chalkboards of the Physics classroom in high school....